Sunset Memorial Gardens, Rockford, Illinois, Perspective

Franz Lipp was a distinguished protégé of Jens Jensen, the influential Prairie School landscape architect who worked with Chicago architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Lipp’s practice included many projects for businesses looking to build sprawling, landscaped campuses outside of major cities. This suburban environment also included new cemeteries that stood apart from the pastoral parcels created as retreats from the city. Lipp’s design for a memorial garden in Rockford, Illinois, was one such space, with loose rows of trees flanking a well-proportioned path. As in years past, monumental sculpture remained a part of the modern cemetery but as a more integrated, even subordinate, element in the natural landscape.